Coliving: Dorms for Grownups | Hacker News Reader

Coliving: Dorms for Grownups

theatlantic.com

80 pointskareemm52 comments

These are a thing in Japan. Not sure how common they are. One of my co-workers now in is 40s recently moved into one.

They generally advertise you'll have an active social live in the shared space and they advertise beautiful shared spaces. I've never been so I don't know if the ads live up to reality.

A few links

http://www.social-apartment.com/

https://www.hituji.jp/

http://tokyosharehouse.com/jpn/

Note there have been crappy shared living houses for ever, for example an infamous one that targets foreigners is Sakura House

The new thing is advertising them as better than living alone and dressing them up, including organizing activities like shared dinners etc..

The new thing is advertising them as better than living alone and dressing them up, including organizing activities like shared dinners etc..

"Here are your new cellmates...I mean friends!"

Happily introverted people would love this arrangement /s. A better decision might be to rent out a capsule in a kapuseru hoteru and use the money saved to enjoy going out with real friends or sit in a quiet izakaya gulping beer and smoking while reading/surfing/hacking.

This contrived social shit reminds me of working in aged care many moons ago. None of the tenants cared deeply for each other and the company running the show was able to fleece them under the guise of a more social, more fun environment. They would have been happier staying in their family home where the spectre of death wasn't standing in every hall.

I suspect that elderly people don't move to one of these places because they are tricked into thinking that it will be better than living with family. I think your comparison is disingenuous.

tricked into thinking that it will be better than living with family

I didn't say that. I said to fleece them under the guise of a more social, more fun environment which is exactly what the sales pitch was. To be around people your own age and do things people like you do, IOW.

And what was inferred by They would have been happier staying in their family home wasn't to be with family, rather that the home is filled with memories of life and accomplishment whereas a death every-other-week at the "village" was a constant reminder of our approaching end, even for the people who worked there.

I think your comparison is disingenuous.

I suspect you say this because older people require care which can be hard to provide at home. Fine. But many of the people who resided there were initially healthy and making a lifestyle change rather than seeking care. A side-effect of moving to a retirement village is that your progeny assume everything is dandy - you've got friends and carers, so they visit less often. The effect is devastating.

I'm not quite as cynical. There's nothing wrong with signing up for a social apartment to me. The concept seems sound. In fact in some ways maybe you could argue it's back to our roots as humans before we lived in houses where we all shared the same cave.

Sorry, I'm not hippie in any way shape for form.

The shared apartments listed above are often themed. I can certainly imagine all kinds of awesome places. An apartment complex for gamers and lan parties. An apartment complex for single parents to co-raise their kids. An apartment complex with a built in makerspace.

It seems like a way to actually make real friends rather than "cellmates". Some people happiest times were in dorms. Why should that stop at college? Sheesh.

Friendships are formed through shared experiences. College dorms by definition have college-aged people, at the same early stage of life, enrolled at the same college, living in the same closed-world social environment. A lot of them will take the same classes, go to the same parties, know the same people. Even if you happen to have a dominantly one-dimensional self-identity (like "gamer" or "single parent") in the adult world, it seems nearly impossible to come close that.

Friendships also form through proximity. Meeting people in your neighborhood for example. But many people living in large cities don't know anyone in their neighborhood. In the suburbs people seem to get to know their neighbors but in my experience people living in cities often don't. Living in a share house would be a step to knowing more people living nearby and interacting with them forming friendships.

> A better decision might be to rent out a capsule in a kapuseru hoteru and use the money saved

Have you stayed at a kapuseru hoteru? That shit is just as expensive as a modest hotel. I mean, you won't get put up at the Park Hyatt for the same cost, but you can stay at a normal hotel or airbnb for pretty much the same as a capsule.

As someone who lives in Tokyo and has looked into share houses, there are two things that I found more attractive about Coliving versus share houses here:

1. Personal space: you get your own bathroom and kitchen. The bathroom especially is a dealbreaker for me.

2. Cost: share houses in Tokyo in decent places are often the same price as an apartment of similar size; there's really no financial benefit.

The share houses I've seen tend to have really bad tenant:facilities ratios for bathrooms, baths/showers, and washers. At worst, I've seen places with (for example) room for 15 tenants, but only one shower, one washer, and two bathrooms. That's far from an ideal situation, especially when I could get my own apartment for the same price...

Been a while since I read anything about it but isn't the main attraction of Sakura House and others that you don't need key money (and all the other pains associated with getting a rental in Japan)?

Yes. Pretty much the only attraction, in fact.

These are already a thing in Seattle--they call them 'apodments': http://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/seattles-mic... There's a lot of controversy around them though as they're in a gray area of regulations. Developers want to take existing buildings, gut them, and rebuild as apodments without adding extra parking or other facilities that a denser building would need.

Adhering-to-regulations aside, I think this is a good thing. Buildings shouldn't be required to have lots of parking. What other facilities are they missing?

Stuff like handicapped access, fire escapes, sprinkler systems etc. can be eschewed from the grey area apodments fall into. Because each unit doesn't have a full kitchen it's not classified the same way as a normal apartment so they can skirt a lot of regulations.

No, these are not apodments. Apodments are the minimum legally rentable unit. The shared area in an apodment is the kitchen only. It can only be shared by 7 units. It is not designed as a social space, and not treated as one per your linked article. It's a hallway and a place to heat up noodles.

This article is talking about larger units, each with their own kitchen, and a large shared area designed for social use.

Right now I'm hunting for second-hand apartment rentals in the most boring and unattractive parts of Sweden because I work remotely, don't need excitement, am okay with being alone, and can't afford big city rent—plus there are no apartments to rent in major Swedish cities unless you've been in the right queue for 15 years. I'd move into one of these things tomorrow if I could. Nothing is less interesting to me than owning furniture or signing long contracts. Yes, I am a millenial.

Consider dwelling in an RV or fit out a fully functional home in a schoolbus. http://hankboughtabus.com

That's pretty amazing but I'm way more likely to just couch surf at my mom's and grandma's and friends'. If I had a drivers license I'd look seriously into the RV thing though.

"Evans plans to create an online recruiting process that will help him select applicants who fit into the community."

Gotta be careful of those discrimination laws.

"a space he envisions as a dorm for Millennials" - he's pretty much over the line from the start if that's an accurate representation of his goals.

Yeah, the fact you have to audition for an overpriced room is kind of offputting, too.

IINM, at least in the US, such laws don't apply to "shared dwelling spaces", which these would count as. (Not a lawyer.)

Certain characteristics can be selected for ("all female" is legal) but it is of doubtful legality to post discriminatory housing ads in terms of age.

This link[1] agrees with you, but I'm wondering how retirement communities get around this. I'm not talking about assisted living, but places like this[2].

[1] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/renters-ri...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laguna_Woods_Village

The Housing for Older Persons Act of 1995 http://www.manufacturedhousing.org/publications/default.asp?...

This is for the landlord-tenant relationship. My understanding is that it's legal for people to advertise for roommates (with whom they share living space) based on pretty much whatever they want.

Why limit to millenials? This seems like it could be tailored to be a good solution for the poor or fixed-income elderly as well.

The elderly already have a whole spectrum of shared living spaces ranging from crappy senior homes to swanky gated communities. This is just rebranding retirement homes as something for young working people.

I detest the idea of living in a space where I could not open a window. I barely tolerate it in an office environment.

Shared living as a middle aged man. Sounds like the ninth inner circle of hell to me. The one just after the eighth inner circle where you freeze in liquid nitrogen for eternity.

It pisses me off that US is turning into a version of USSR. The housing described in the article approaches the horrors of Soviet communal apartments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment

I wonder if this kind of thing is starting up more simply due to the rise in the age of first marriages?

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005061.html

Why doesn't Y-combinator have such, I always wondered. Small bedrooms and small offices, I mean. It would save a lot of money for startups and it would also let them mingle a lot, maybe too much :)

I thought about this idea a while back when I saw an article about modernizing the concept of the trailer park home. I guess cultural grouping could be bad if it lead to more homogeneous thinking, but maybe it could occur naturally on a smaller scale in the same building and provide a different dynamic of interaction, kind of like what you see in some neighborhoods in NYC.

These stories are becoming tiresome. "Millenials" did not invent living in a house with roommates, or coops, or boarding houses, or SROs, or any of the living arrangements that have existed for centuries that pre-date scumbags in San Francisco trying to charge foolish engineers $1,000 for a bunk.

None of these things are new, true, but they're not common. It's not so easy finding a co-op to live in if you're not near a university, or, for that matter, even if you are near one, especially if you're not a student. If they're becoming more common, that's a trend worth broadcasting; hopefully it continues.

I'll agree that presenting it as a new invention, or something tailored for this radical new generation of "Millenials", is a bit obnoxious and misleading. But I'm still glad to see this sort of thing.

A number of those things have been very common and living with housemates at least was very common among professionals recently out of school a few decades back in my experience. I didn't personally but I knew many people who lived in a shared house for a few years after school.

33 and I still "flat" with other people. I've lived with same couple for over 5 years now in two seperate places. We've stayed together as it were as we get on and can manage our lives without annoying each other. The only reason to do it, it halves the cost of everything i.e rent, power, water and internet.

If I had't been so stupid with my finances in my twenties I might be in a different place but I would be wasting money without knowing it.

I've been lucky with the flatmates I have now. I've had some average ones before and I'm not sure If I will do it for much longer but it has it's upsides.

> It's not so easy finding a co-op to live in if you're not near a university

CoWorks, the development in the story, is located exactly one mile from Syracuse University: https://goo.gl/maps/HhJmvrsFR6z

Very much agreed. This is just an economically rational response to the housing prices young renters face in urban areas and the lack of community they/we grew up with in the suburbs. Thus the logical solution: live with a bunch of other people, and form a community out of them.

Is there a plan to make this website render on Mobile Firefox?

Yes. The plan is to fix the bug.

This question is off-topic though. If you want to ask us something, the site guidelines request that you email hn@ycombinator.com.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10538020 and marked it off-topic.

> If you want to ask us something, the site guidelines request that you email hn@ycombinator.com.

Tried that. Got insults for my trouble.

Why do the mods bother to downvote? Isn't that an abuse of power?

Your comment was downvoted by regular users. No one can downvote replies to themselves.

I doubt that we insulted you, though it's plausible we told you that your HN comments are problematic, and sometimes people interpret that as an insult.

You certainly did insult me, and denying it to my face is a further insult.

already posted twice over past 3 days, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523455

I posted this 22h ago: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5930/deletable/hn.png

But it's showing up on the front page that I posted it 4h ago: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5930/deletable/hn-frontp...

The id is the same (10531322) so I'm guessing this is part of the "repost interesting stories that didn't get traction" experiment that HN is trying.

FWIW I didn't actually repost this a second time. Guessing the software or one of the mods has a "move this story back to the 'new' queue" feature if they think it should be given a second chance at frontpage glory.

You got it—that's exactly what's going on. Instead of inviting a repost, we're re-upping posts by resetting their timestamps and otherwise treating them the way an invited repost would be. So far we're only doing this for submissions that are up to a day old, but I don't see why it couldn't extend back a week or two, especially since that would let us privilege the original submission in most cases.

We considered resetting the timestamp a while ago and thought the community wouldn't like it, but people turned out to dislike the repost solution more, because it pollutes the story stream with more dupes. A couple users suggested the timestamp approach, so we gave it a try, and indeed it works better. It also has bonus properties like not relying on an account having an email address (or people reading their email).

This is the latest in a series of experiments we've been running to try to give the best stories multiple chances at making the front page. The holy grail of this is figuring out a way to distribute the work of picking 'the best stories' to the community, in a way that doesn't just reduce to upvoting. (The latter bit is important, since if upvoting worked for this, we wouldn't have the problem in the first place.) We're hoping to get to that soon.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the re-upped timestamps only appear on the /news and /item pages. If you look elsewhere, such as the /submitted page for the user, or the /from page for the site, the original timestamp is displayed. So you can think of /submitted as the historical record and /news as displaying a timestamp relative to other posts on the front page.

Edit: here are some links for anyone interested in how these experiments have evolved:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10395389

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9866140

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8790134

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9828818

How would this affect any future dataset / research of HN posts?

Not sure. The two timestamps will converge over time.

I get that this is annoying, and we're working on a plan to group duplicate submissions together, but in the meantime everyone needs to understand that allowing reposts until a story has had significant attention is explicitly ok here. It's a tactic for letting the best stories surface, which is the #1 quality concern for HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=...

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